However, something happened between the writing of the Bible and the settling of the traditional Christian doctrine of God. What came between them was Plato.

Technically, it was Neoplatonism. But I'm not writing a book, I'm writing a newspaper essaycolumn, and a lot of fine distinctions are going to be left out.

For a thorough treatment of the details, read "How Greek Philosophy Corrupted the Christian Concept of God," by Richard R. Hopkins.

Plato taught that all physical objects are unreal because they're corrupt and imperfect and doomed to change and die. The perfect chair or star or stone or man has no tangible existence — only the "idea" of these things can be real because only the idea does not change or corrupt or break or die.

Likewise, whatever we call true, beautiful or good in this world is merely a shadow of the ideal, and therefore real and unchanging Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

In Plato's view, the only god worth worshipping is the perfect ideal of the True, the Beautiful and the Good.

That god cannot have any physical presence in time and space because physicality and duration would diminish its perfection.

The Bible, however, is thick with references to the physical existence of God. We are made in his image, says Genesis. Christ went to some trouble to show his disciples that he had become a resurrected being with a body of flesh and bone. Yet somehow, within a few generations after the writing of the New Testament, "traditional Christianity" had adopted Plato's definition of the perfection of God, and treated the biblical physicality of God as metaphor.

The main point of disagreement between Mormons and traditional Christianity is that we believe in the biblical God — the God in whose image we were made, the resurrected Christ with a perfect body of flesh and bone — and they don't.

Or, rather, their theologians don't. Most ordinary Christians ignore the creeds; when they pray, they're thinking of God as a person with a face, with arms and legs, who actually exists in space and time.

They believe in the biblical God, as we do. You have to go to college to accept the paradoxes of the platonic God that traditional Christianity has embraced.

To help make the difference clear, let me use, as a parable, some "doctrines" we all learned in high school geometry class: A line is perfectly straight and infinitely long.

All lines in the same plane either touch or they don't touch. If they don't touch, they are parallel and they go in the same direction, infinitely.

Those are the only two choices with lines in the same plane: They're either parallel or they intersect somewhere.